History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present | Page 3

against the person or property committed by Jews
are rare. They likewise do not figure in either police courts or
penitentiary records; they are not inmates of our poor-houses, but, what
is also singular, they are never accused of many silly crimes, such as
indecent exposures, assaults on young girls; nor do they figure in any
such exposures as the one recently made by the Pall Mall Gazette.
After allowing all that, which we can, in its fullest limit, to religion,
family, or social habit, there is still a wide margin to be accounted for.
This has naturally let the inquiry, followed in the course of this book,
into a careful review of the Jewish people; into their religion and its
character, its relation to other creeds, and to the world's history; into
their many wanderings, and into the dispersion, and we have even been
obliged to follow them into the midst of the people among whom they
have become nationed, to try, if possible, to find the cause of this racial
difference in health, resistance to disease, decay, and death. It has been
necessary, in following out the research, to give a condensed résumé of
the religious, political, and social condition of the Jewish
commonwealth, which, although in a state of dispersion, still exists. I
need offer no apology for the extended notice this has received in the
course of the book. We read with increasing interest either Hallam or
May, Buckle or Guizot, through the spasmodic, halting, retrograding,
advancing, erratic, aimless, and accidental phases that England has
plowed through, from the days of goutless, simple, and chaste, but
barbarian England of the Saxons, to the present civilized, enlightened,
gouty, "Darkest England" of General Booth; and, after all is said and
done, we are no wiser in any practical resulting good. We simply know
that the English people, so to speak, have, as it were, gone through the
figures of some social aspects, as if dancing the "Lancers," with its

forward and back movements, gallop, etc., and have finally sat down,
better dressed and better housed, but in an acquired state of moral and
physical degeneration. The Briton of Queen Victoria is not the Briton
of Queen Boadicea, either morally or physically. On the other hand, the
system of sociological tables adopted by Herbert Spencer would have
but little to record for some six thousand years--either in religion,
morals, or physique--as making any changes in the history of that
simple people which, in the mountainous regions of Ur, in distant
Armenia, started on its pilgrimage of life and racial existence; in one
branch of the family--that of Ishmael--the changes to be recorded are so
invisible that its descendants may really be said to live to-day as they
lived then. So that I do not feel that I need to apologize for the space I
have given to this subject in the course of the book. The causes that
make these racial distinctions should be of interest alike to the moralist,
theologist, sociologist, and to the physician.
Ecclesiastical writers and moralists, as well as writers of fiction or
dramatizers, can write on anything they please, and it is eagerly taken
up and read by the people generally, either of high or low degree, alike;
and somehow these people seem never to require an apology on the
part of the author, for having attempted rapes, seductions, or even
unavoidable fornication committed through the leaves of the story, or
having it imaginably take place between acts on the stage. But if the
physician writes a book touching anything connected with the
generative functions, and with the best intent and for the good of
humanity, he is expected to make some prefatory apology. He is
supposed to address a public who all of a sudden have become
intensely moral and extremely sensitive in their modesty. Why things
are thus I cannot explain. They are so, nevertheless. From the time that
the celebrated Astruc wrote his treatise on female diseases, near the end
of the seventeenth century,--who felt compelled by the extreme
modesty of the people in this particular--but who, outside of medicine,
were about as virtuous as the average Tabby or Tom cats in the
midnight hour--to write the chapter touching on nymphomania in Latin,
so as not to shock the morbidly sensitive modesty of the French
nobility, who then enjoyed Le Droit de cuissage,--down through to
Bienville, who wrote the first extended work on nymphomania, and

Tissot, who first broached the subject and the danger of Onanism, all
have felt that they must stop on the threshold and "apologize." Tissot,
however, seemed to possess a robust and a plain Hippocratic mind, and
as he apologized he could not help but see the ridiculousness of so
doing, as in the preface to his work we